Waypoint Kangaroo —
Curtis C. Chen

The
agent code-named Kangaroo may not be the most
skilled agent in the agency, but he is their only super-powered agent. Too useful to fire, too hard to explain, a looming audit
convinces Kangaroo’s bosses that this is the perfect time to send
Kangaroo off Earth on an all expenses paid holiday to Mars.
Independent Mars may be the player on the other side of the cold war
gripping the Solar System, but it is also safely distant from the
prying eyes of unsympathetic federal bureaucrats.

The
Dejah
Thoris
is six thousand tonnes of grotesquely over-powered luxury liner, one
that can transport its cargo of pampered passengers to Mars in under
a week. Not just a machine for moving people, the liner is also
designed to extract money from its wealthy guests as expeditiously as
possible. A wonderful place to stay, if you are travelling on someone
else’s platinum card. It’s even better if you can manage a
whirlwind shipboard romance.

The
only off-note is the gruesome double murder.

In
the wrong place at the wrong time, exposed as more than the amiable
tourist he purports to be, Kangaroo is drafted by the crew to help
find the killer. He and his allies believe that they are looking for
a mentally-ill war veteran off his meds. What they actually find is
far worse: a plot to crash the
Dejah
Thoris
into Mars’ largest city. If Kangaroo and his friends cannot outwit
their enemies, millions will die.

~oOo~

My
apologies to the author: I am going to spend more time discussing the
set than the play.

Many
decades ago, in the early issues of the Mark Shaw
Manhunterseries,
Shaw found himself on the trail of Dr Alchemy, a criminal who had
mastered a limited form of transmutation. As Shaw pointed out, there
are many legal ways Dr Alchemy could used his ability to get rich.
What this criminal actually did was rob banks for money that he spent
on buxom red-heads and betting on the Cubs. This was not a winning strategy.

Manhunter
came
to mind is because Kangaroo has an awesome special ability that is
woefully misused. Kangaroo can open a 15m wide portal to a very
large, very empty, pocket universe. All through the book I kept
thinking of much more interesting things he could do with his power
than the things he actually does. For example, he’s a one-man cargo
fleet
1.
He’s a one-man bomb shelter (although if he dies, the people hiding
inside him are trapped). Given time, you could use him to move
Europa’s oceans to Mars. There are all kinds of neat things
Kangaroo will never do, because he has the wrong job.

Waypoint
Kangaroo
is
set in yet another fictional universe with hilariously overpowered
rocket ships:
Dejah
Thoris
can accelerate at almost one gee for extended periods of time. This
has some interesting implications, one of which drives the plot:
space craft are all potential weapons of mass destruction:

Just
one day at nine meters per second per second leaves the ship moving
at 777,600 m/s. Ek = 1/2MV2 means each kilogram of the ship has 3x1011 joules of kinetic energy. Since the Dejah
Thoris
masses six thousand tonnes, that means its total Ek relative to
Doomed City, Mars, is 1.8x10
18
joules,
well over 400 megatons of TNT. Which would be bad.

Of course, as certain historical events show, you do not need 450 MT of kinetic energy to wreak havoc with a stolen passenger vehicle. Even a more plausible rocket would be a potential WMD. But SF authors love spectacle.

Given
that the Martian War of Independence involved asteroid strikes, you
would think both sides would have distant early warning systems to
keep an eye out for rocket drives on a vector that intersects a
planet
2. As far as I can tell, that is not the case. The crew has to alert the
authorities that there is a safety issue. A big one. But I suppose
this is part of the setting: there’s no way to hoick asteroids at
Earth without anyone spotting what’s up months ahead of time …
unless the people in charge of keeping an eye out for gigawatt-plus
heat sources are woefully incompetent. Apparently they still are.

What’s
going here is Curtis is not the sort of detail-obsessed nerd who
makes the fatal error of murdering his ability to suspend disbelief
by learning too much about rocket science
3.
He’s using a collection of time honoured stock props
4 to tell a story about a wise-cracking agent of a sort you’ve
probably seen in a thousand books and movies. If you’re looking for
a guy with a line in snappy patter who gets to zoom between planets,
fight bad guys, and canoodle with one very lucky engineer, this is
probably the book for you.